What's real here, and what isn't

• The airfares are real, captured Aug 22, 2026. Pulled from airline inventory through Duffel for specific dates — arrive the day before, leave the day after. Cheapest economy round trip, one connection maximum, chosen from up to 295 offers per game. Fares move after capture; treat the numbers as a ranking, verify before booking.
• Validated against hand-gathered prices. Omaha to Seattle came back at $409 against $408 written down independently months earlier in a real fan's spreadsheet.
• Room rates are government per-diem — mid-tier business lodging, by city and month, which does not move for a game weekend. We measured 30 real game weekends against matched control weekends to see whether that matters: it mostly does not. The median game weekend cost 0.99× a normal weekend in the same city. The exception is Green Bay — measured across all 9 Packers home games, game weekends there run 2.3–5.6× a normal weekend (median 4.2×). Those games are priced at the measured level — their room figure carries the 4.2× multiplier, not the per-diem — and they wear a Hotel spike flag. The five next-smallest markets tested clean.
• Flight and ticket links earn us a commission if you use them, at no extra cost to you. Flight links open Aviasales with your dates filled in; ticket links open an official ticket seller. The commission never changes the ranking — every ranking is computed on cost before any link exists, and the ticket figure is the one you typed in.
• The Holiday tag is calendar, not price. It marks games in the Thanksgiving (Nov 25–29), Christmas (Dec 24–27) and New Year (Dec 30–Jan 3) travel windows — busy airports and family calendars, whatever the fare says. Some of those games are genuinely cheap to fly to; the price chips stay measured and say so.
• Ticket price is yours to set, because you know what you'd actually pay for a seat. One number applies to every game, so tickets set the scale but travel drives the ranking. Change it and the order stays put.
• Driving is priced wherever it's sane — within 6 hours each way, at 27 mpg on pump prices, and the cheaper of the two sets the ranking. Across the cities we price, driving wins on 672 games, by a median of $328. Some of those are drive-only, because no one-stop flight runs those dates — Omaha to Kansas City is a drive, and we priced it to the dollar.
• The Greenlight chip is measured, not an opinion. A game earns it when its travel cost runs 15% or more below the median trip to that same city this season — so a saving in $587 Denver counts the same as one in $1,047 New York. 299 of 2,800 games qualify. Peak week is the same measure 30% the other way; the flags cluster on the holiday travel dates in the NFL and the late-winter weekends in the NHL.
• The Greenlight measure ignores your ticket price and crew size. It is computed on travel cost for one traveller, on purpose — ticket price is a number you type, so letting it move the measure would make it an opinion. Cheapest-first ranking uses your real numbers; the Greenlights ranking uses the measured one.
• Four cities are priced so far — Omaha, Columbus, Kansas City and Nashville. Every fare was bought for that specific origin; serving one city's board to a neighbour was tested across six pairs and does not hold, so each city gets its own run of live searches (about $7 and two hours).
• Nine NFL games are outside the United States and aren't priced — Melbourne, Rio, London three times, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Mexico City. They're shown, marked, and left out of the ranking. All 1,344 NHL games are priced, Canada included.
• Canadian rooms come from a different government. The seven Canadian NHL markets use Public Services and Procurement Canada's city accommodation limits, converted at the Bank of Canada rate. That is a maximum rather than an average, so it reads a little high — but airfare, not lodging, explains 96% of why a Canadian trip costs more.
• Greenlight deals never cross leagues. A game is measured against other trips to the same city in the same league. Pooling them would have tripled NFL badges for no reason beyond NHL trips to the same city costing more on average.
• Hotel rates for October onward use the prior fiscal year — the government hadn't published 2027 rates yet. Flagged per row in the table view.